"Why do you want to win?" Victor "Slangston Hughes" Rodgers, 33, asks an eager group of five young poets at the Edward R. Murrow Park in Washington, D.C., back in July. He has been coaching youth poetry teams for the last five years, but this team, the sixth Baltimore Citywide Youth Poetry Team...

I think of the writer and champion of cities Jane Jacobs every time I walk to work. I have a small office studio on the 200 block of Park Avenue. As I cross Saratoga heading south on Park, I pass International Fragrance, Blue Sky Diner, Jeanius Styles (closed), Dimensions In Music (closed), the...

Mikita Brottman, a MICA professor, Oxford scholar, and psychoanalyst, spent four years running a book club for nine prisoners at Jessup Correctional Institution and wrote about her experience, turning her sharp gaze on both the selected literature and the men who read it. The resulting book, "The...

I first moved to Baltimore in February 2001, just a year after Adnan Syed was found guilty of murdering his ex-girlfriend and fellow Woodlawn High School classmate Hae Min Lee. The story had largely disappeared from the news by that time, because it seemed like an open-and-shut case. According...

My hand is holding an object that looks somewhat like a bar of soap: smooth and pink, but not waxy like soap is. Pressed into it, like a brand, with haphazard letters and pieces of plastic broken to look like letters, are the words "CLEAN 5UM." I take the cord coming out of one end and plug it...

"Wet Moon: Feeble Wanderings" by Sophie Campbell (Oni Press) Set in Savannah, Georgia, at an art school, graphic novel "Wet Moon" is a sprawling millennial soap opera (that's a good thing, by the way) that began in 2004 and consists of six volumes and a few hundred pages so far (this recent reissue...

"Troy it's your turn to read," Ms. Tilghman ripped from the front of the classroom. "A'ight man, yelling ain't called for yah'mean?" Troy responded. He began reading from "Julius Caesar" with his voice pitched high and stifled like he swallowed a small bird: "I am glad that my weak words, have...

For 1942's "The Creature from the Black Lagoon," whatever wasn't filmed on a Hollywood studio lot was filmed in the swamplands of Rice Creek, Florida. That creature-feature bridge between two states with a mythology of being swallowed by the ocean speaks a lot to Florida's sense of apocalyptic...

Lezley McSpadden is not here to bullshit you. McSpadden is the mother of Missouri teen Mike Brown, who was gunned down in August of 2014 by police officer Darren Wilson, and whose death arguably sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. In her new book "Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil: The Life,...

Norman Mailer, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968” (Random House) Random House couldn’t have chosen a better time to reprint Norman Mailer’s account of 1968’s political conventions than in the current 2016 election season. We’re...

Alice Munro, “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories” (Alfred A. Knopf) My requirement for a good summer vacation read is tricky. I like to fall into a book, the way you stand backwards on the edge of a pool and free fall. And down under the water, as you plummet, everything...

I spent too much money at this year's Publications and Multiples Fair—on art, poetry zines, and ceramic pieces—and then even more at Red Emma's more recently, and then I said a little prayer and dug into my savings so I could buy a couple things from Bookish, the bookshop-on-wheels that made its...

Every Rib You Eat is A Consequence google search "latex forearm" and then google search "the soft vulnerable part" every poem I write is actually a better subtweet than maybe anything I would actually subtweet And every subtweet is just like me wanting you to give me all of your attention until...

On April 27, in front of the CVS Pharmacy at Pennsylvania Avenue and North Avenue, poet/writer/activist (and City Paper contributor) Tariq Touré read his poem, 'April 27th.' With its sobering refrain of, "I looked Freddie in the eyes today," and a series of novelistic details building up a character...

I looked Freddie in the eye today and watched infants drenched in the placenta of revolution stream down from his tear ducts, cascade onto the cement, and roll in the crevices of the sidewalk I watched puffs of dirt bike smoke swim across his pupils as the two-wheeled Lords of concrete swam through...

There is a curious (and admittedly, mostly made-up) film noir subgenre I've taken to calling "picaresque noir." It consists of crime stories that don't stay in one place for too long and feel more episodic and stitched together than short and sweet. Plug novels such as Jean-Patrick Manchette's...

Emily Lindin’s middle school diary is not so much an emotional rollercoaster as a runaway train speeding through a nightmarish Boschian hellscape, frequently interrupted by sparkling yet anxiety-inducing preteen fantasies and ‘90s pop-inspired poems. Published in the book “UnSlut: A Diary and Memoir”...

I want to believe in James Franco. For those readers who are new to the figure of Franco the artist, the actor-cum-poet has been part of the literary conversation since his collection of short stories, “Palo Alto,” was published by Scribner in 2010. Much of this conversation has been skepticism,...

No other book out right now so expertly describes what it's like to live and work in the United States as Lester K. Spence's "Knocking The Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics." A cogent rundown of the ways this country has been crippled by its embrace of neoliberalism, the book...

s/o to the smudging sage at the office of the therapist who made me give a detailed list of my sexual history as a teenage girl then invited me to take peyote with him in oklahoma as long as i didn't tell my parents s/o to the lavender scented candle i roasted a hot link over one of the times my...

I'm in the middle of cashiering a transaction, during the lunch rush, and on the verge of being profoundly annoyed when this weird old man appears behind my counter. "Please, finish whatever you need to. I just had a question," he says. He says he would like to put the bill for a group of Johns...

For many years, our three offspring requested an addition to the family clan, a fourth child to love (or so they claimed. It's possible that they only craved equality: even sides for dinner arguments and rounds of Mario Kart.). While my husband and I did not relent, we marveled at their worrisome...

To remix an old saw for the Internet age: Familiarity breeds a particularly nasty, exhausted sort of apathy—the burnout of overexposure to a brand, whether it be Hulu's fusillade of unchanging ads, Upworthy's smug click bait, or an artist's monomaniacal shtick. For a longtime devotee, the first...

With its profound collection of books and prints dating as far back as the Renaissance, as well as its history and Neo-Grec architecture and ornamentation, the George Peabody Library is as much a museum as the Walters across the street. But for the past year, it has been at once a library, a museum,...

"Yasiin" Beyond the 24-hour news cycle There is a place Where politicians eat the dreams of children And men die for mineral wealth Where Slavery is the order of the day And peace is an ancient idea Where men become obese from the flesh of Nations And lies come bundled in tight-eyed smiles Where...

To get a sense of how Ray Lewis writes in his expressive, tangent-filled, hyper-sincere memoir "I Feel Like Going On," it's best to get a sense of how he talks. On Jan. 12, 2013, following the Baltimore Ravens' victory over the Denver Broncos which got the team one game closer to the Super Bowl,...

This better be some good stuff. I'm out voyaging in girl looks. Roaming from club to bar, looking for scandals, eyeing for some peacocks. Colorful ones. Nice build, thick, pleasantly stout, and big eyed. Why? Ask my scabs. My punctuation marks on my skin. They cover my left arm like leprosy, following...

Kenneth Morrison steps out in front of the small group. He raises his arms and eyes to the ceiling and, with a preacher's inflection, says, "Scriptures suggest that the return of Jesus was near. But what if Jesus was already here? What if Jesus was a prostitute?" The small audience of MICA graduate...

Teens can be crude, mean, prickly, and obnoxious, but they are not dumb. And often, their disinterest in being polite, and even their lack of awareness about the verisimilitude of what we adults think of as the complexity or subtlety of an event, affords them a special kind of insight. "The 2015...

Kondwani Russell can be found sitting on his grandmother's step penning prose and pondering the perplex nature of black life in America. His recent poem 'The Baltimore Bullet Train,' a cinematic spoken-word video posted to YouTube, addresses the school-to-prison pipeline, black leadership, violence,...

As a black child growing up in America, receiving "the talk" is inevitable. Not the talk about where babies really come from, but the talk that brings you to reality—and that talk comes in stages. I remember walking home with my mother as a young child. She came to pick me up from my grandmother's...

There is something both comforting and terrifying in the idea that identity can be fluid, that our senses of self don't have to be rigidly defined. The word itself flows like water and implies something that changes or refreshes; it also feels uncertain, as if it lacks structure. But Maggie Nelson's...

For the unexpecting, there is nothing more dreadful than the baby shower. At least in theory. I’m a guy and, blessedly, I am rarely invited to such things. Generally, for men, not having kids is much different than it is for women, who are often treated as if they are giving up a biological imperative...

After years of writing about doomed juvenile affections, heavy drinking, reckless sex with “so many nameless lovers,” affairs, awful married life, and misguided cravings for beauty, Gary Blankenburg returns with a book charged with piety and faith. “If you’ve known my previous works,” Blankenburg...

If anyone thought the prolific American writer Jane Smiley, now 65, peaked early with 1991’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Acres” almost a quarter century ago, they’d be wrong. With works ranging from the nonfiction “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel,” 13 novels, and five young-adult novels,...

For my first 10 years of independence I made a point of saying that I could strap everything I owned to the top of my ’67 Nova and haul down the road. It was almost true. When I went off to college I borrowed an old Sears jigsaw from my uncle and a roof rack from my neighbor. With a set of Craftsman...

Without giving it much thought, most Orioles fans would tell you Jim Palmer is the best pitcher in franchise history. They might not know about the right shoulder injury in 1968 that nearly ended his career—and the story behind how he healed it. And true Orioles nerds could tell you Palmer was...

Rachel Kushner’s first novel, “Telex From Cuba,” a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008, is set on the island in the 1950s when expatriates and American companies/colonists built their own little exploitative worlds in a moist, hot environment ripe for revolution, sex, and violence. “Telex”...

Only a certain kind of customer will fill out a handwritten comment card and mail it in to a faceless, multinational corporation. Most of those comment cards will be scribbled complaints—“barista had out-of-date mustache,” “vegan latte tasted burnt.” But the comedian and artist Christine Ferrera...

A ground-breaking study by Johns Hopkins sociologists Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson has been on bookshelves for nearly a year, but “ The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth and the Transition to Adulthood” is particularly relevant now in light of a much splashier...

Kevin Sherry describes a letter from Quentin Blake, illustrator of Roald Dahl’s many children’s books, as his “best possession.” It’s fitting for someone who is now in the business of producing self-illustrated children’s books, in particular “The Yeti Files” series, the first of which was released...

When you have a baby, you imagine reading to them, snuggled up in a rocking chair, sharing beloved stories. And it’s like that, in the early days, when your baby is an adorable casing for unpredictable bodily fluids that stares at you lovingly. But way too soon, your little one will start having...

Before I had kids, I was really judgmental about parents. I remember visiting my sister and watching as she served a flavorful dinner to the adults, and a separate dinner of chicken nuggets and mac and cheese to her young kids. “I’ll never do that,” I thought. When my wife was pregnant, we would...

When local literary sweetheart Laura Lippman releases a new Tess Monaghan whodunit, insider nods to our great and flawed city and long-established Monaghan idiosyncrasies (rubbing that scar on her knee) show up as often on the page as clues to the mystery du jour. “Hush Hush” (Harper Collins),...

It would be easy to dismiss Anne Tyler’s “A Spool of Blue Thread” (Knopf) as “domestic.” It is literally so, with a plot that revolves around a Roland Park home where the Whitshank family’s deep front porch welcomes neighbors, friends, and the occasional drama. For Tyler, though, the domestic realm...

Whenever I’m a passenger in a car, train, or bus, there’s a part of me that just wants to keep going, never reaching my destination, and continuing on the journey forever. As we pass through cities and towns, full of people and places I won’t know, the slowness makes me more contemplative—like...

Living in a relatively small city, you’re going to run into people you’ve dated or hooked up with, and it will probably happen often. You might see them at bars or shows, and occasionally you’ll have to awkwardly climb over their legs in order to get to your seat at an artist talk (for a purely...

Early last year, when people started talking seriously again about the decriminalization of marijuana, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced that she should not be “waving the Schmoke flag of legalization.” She was referring to former mayor Kurt Schmoke, who in the 1980s recommended the legalization...

When Jill Abramson took over as the executive editor of the New York Times back in September 2011, among the many criticisms thrown at the first woman to have that top-dog job at the paper was the fact that she was just about to publish “The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout.” No matter...

In the sunroom of Grace Cavalieri’s Annapolis home, a sepia photo of a U.S. Navy pilot sits atop a hand-crafted Nakashima table. In the picture Ken Flynn sits in his airplane’s cockpit, his goggles pushed up on his head, his grin brimming with the confidence only a 22-year-old can have. That photo...

It’s always strange to return to your hometown once you’ve left, especially if so many others you know stayed put. I grew up in Howard County, and it seems as though every time I return to my parents’ house for a weekend visit, I have yet another awkward encounter with someone I went to elementary...

Peniel E. Joseph begins the narrative of his definitive 2014 biography of Stokely Carmichael on a humid Mississippi night. He describes the 24-year-old Carmichael speaking to a crowd in the open air on a warm, late-spring evening after his most recent arrest while organizing for change in 1966...

Life is a constant stream of transitions. Whether it is aging, growing closer, or growing apart, we’re always either coming or going. Jason Tinney sets his latest collection of stories right on these transitions with his book “Ripple Meets the Deep” (City Lit Press). The title alludes to the...

Gregory Sherl’s debut novel “The Future for Curious People” had promise of being a quick, satisfying read. It had an interesting premise with lavish praise by fellow authors on the back, so I thought it would be a great way to pass the time—but I quickly realized that I was reading the print equivalent...

I’ve been pondering the words “It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?” since I first heard them echo out of the planetary weirdness of Sun Ra’s ‘Space Is the Place’ 20-some odd years ago. As in a Zen koan, at first, these words make no literal sense. How could there be knowledge,...

Contemporary memoirists seem to be in competition to see who’s been through the worst shit, sharing their roughest moments in the most emotionally affective way, while also trying to make these moments relatable and turn them into stories we can learn from. Elissa Washuta’s memoir “My Body Is a...

Frank O’Hara wrote that his theory of poetry—a theory that he dubbed "Personism" in a mock manifesto by the same name—places the poem “squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified.” If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a quick Google search...

In his new book “Information Doesn’t Want to be Free: Laws for the Internet Age,” Cory Doctorow writes that “science fiction writers are terrible at predicting the future.” But, this book, which he will be discussing at Red Emma’s on Nov. 21, shows that Doctorow, primarily known for his science...

Senior year of high school. Lunch. Two hot dogs and a bag of Wise potato chips on the table in front of him. Barney Austin’s chem lab partner sits down across from him. “It looks like we’re going to get out of here on time,” his partner says. Barney asks, “Yeah, but once we’re out, where do we...

When Tre’Quan, a student of mine, threw hands at a student in the cafeteria of the repurposed William H. Lemmel Middle School in West Baltimore this fall and then resisted police—getting cuffed and put in the squad car—most in the school shrugged. After all, he was coming back this year after some...

When it comes to clothes, I’ve always been pretty girly. But when I was a sports copy editor for a small newspaper, my femme fashion leanings kicked into overdrive. I’d show up for work in lace dresses, high heels, floral chiffon skirts, vintage dresses—standing in stark contrast to the jeans-and-casual-shirt...

If you’re a careful reader of this paper, you may have looked at the cover and thought “What the fuck is up with City Paper and all of this ‘Blade Runner’ shit?” Well, over the last year, a couple of our writers have been obsessed with this notion that our globalized 21st-century world is starting...

Just a few pages into Michael Kimball's "Galaga" (Boss Fight Books), an exploration of the 1981 coin-op arcade game (it's the one where you're a space ship firing at insects) and the abuse he endured at the hands of his older brother and father, I had to put the book down for a bit. It sent me...